Eva Díaz carried out her gender transition at the age of 52. She was a managing partner of a consultancy and he left everything “out of fear”as she herself recalls: “I wasn’t able to where he had been in a jacket and tie, appear the next day in a dress and with heels”, explains the current CEO of ‘Shaping The New’.

Alicia García, for her part, did it at 38, during the pandemic: “From the privacy of my own home, testing myself, gaining confidence little by little, without having to worrying about what people in the office would think“, recalls the head of technical architecture at BBVA.

Both have gone through fear, which for Eva was “brutal”: “Fear is absolutely wildgenerated by expectations that you create for yourself”, she affirms. “You don’t know how the world will receive youyou still do not have that confidence in yourself to go down the street with that poise and say ‘here I am and this is me'”, Alicia points out. The most complicated thing, they agree, the day after

In Eva’s case, she says she had to change your leadership model: “When you are a woman and when you are a man you can no longer lead the same way because they don’t receive you the same. When you are a man, it is generally not questioned, it is what the CEO says and that’s it, it’s over. When I started directing as a woman, it was questionable,” she recounts. “Others too. they are responding to you completely differently to what they did before,” Alicia points out.

The road, they say, is lonely, they confess, but liberating: “You feel very free and when you feel very free you are very happy“, sums up Eva, while Alicia now defines herself as “a person much more capable of seeing everything good in life.”

Transphobia in the workplace

Although their transition has not affected their professional career, 55% of trans people acknowledge that they have been excluded in job interviews and 70% feel that they are not accepted. Ízaro Assa de Amilibia, president of the Business Network for LGBTI Diversity and Inclusion (REDI), maintains that “they are the most stigmatized within the LGTBIQ collective and the ones that find it most difficult to achieve full social integration.”

“They also have many difficulties in the professional environment, companies have yet to build build more inclusive cultures“, he claims.